Plan Your Trip Times Picks

Newcomers on Mexico's Pacific

By MARK A. UHLIG; MARK A. UHLIG is the Mexico City bureau chief of The New York Times.

Published: December 23, 1990

IF there is a color that can define the allure of Mexico at this time of year, it is blue, the brilliant, sapphire blue of the Pacific Ocean, which takes on remarkable, radiant hues as it reaches the beaches and promontories of Mexico's southwest shore. The natural beauty of its Pacific coast has long been glimpsed in passing by tourists who visit such heavily developed vacation spots as Acapulco, the aging queen of Mexican tourism. But this long ragged coastline and its azure sea are also home to some of Mexico's newest and best beach resorts.

A good first stop is Manzanillo, one of the best established of the coast's newer generation of tourist areas, and home of one of the country's best-known resorts, Las Hadas. Manzanillo, a city of about 45,000 people that is just over an hour by scheduled jet from Mexico City, has the kind of efficient small airport that is, pleasingly enough, common to all three of the Pacific resort areas I visited.

Although new by the standards of generations-old standbys like Acapulco, Las Hadas has been around long enough to win an international reputation. As a result, it is conspicuously cosmopolitan, with only modest nods to Mexican culture. Not content with simply ignoring Mexican architecture, as so many other resort planners have done, the designers of Las Hadas set out to supplant it entirely, using the steep side of an ocean peninsula to create a striking, self-contained Moorish-style city, incorporating 220 rooms, complete with elaborately paved streets, squares and twisting, dome-topped spires.

However improbable the conception, the result is visually spectacular and functionally impressive. The intricate, stark-white facades, accented with gardens of lavender bougainvillea, palms, and climbing vines, only seem to intensify the vivid blue of the sea. The stair-stepped rooms and suites in this 650-acre layout evoke a private home in a spotless seaside town.

During my three-day stay, I had a slightly larger-than-standard room with a cool, uncluttered interior and a domed entry hall with marble floors and such an unusual octagonal shape that it alone would count as a minor architectural marvel. Like all rooms at Las Hadas, it had a balcony overlooking the bay, and room service was particularly swift given the considerable distance the waiters had to travel.

Although room rates at Las Hadas place it in the highest-priced category of Mexican hotels, that expense is rewarded with a kind of efficient, knowledgeable service that is virtually unknown elsewhere in the country, particularly in Mexico City. The sense of quality is reinforced by an equally rare and gratifying attention to detail, from precise white marble tilework to the artistic arrangement of fish and octopus in the mixed ceviche, a marinated Latin American specialty of raw seafood.

Lest a guest forget entirely that he or she is in Mexico, Las Hadas offers a Mexican festival each week. But anyone looking for a real touch of national charm might well forgo the requisite tequila toasts and souvenir jewelry for a lunch at Los Delfines, the resort's beachside restaurant. There, if you ask, a guitar-strumming father-and-son duo, with nothing more elaborate than their stained straw hats, rough white clothes and razor-sharp wit, will do you the hilarious, distinctly Mexican favor of drawing your portrait in song, making up the words as they go.

One drawback to the resort is the size of its dark-sand beach, which offers white, Arabian-style canopied lounge chairs and attentive service but lacks the open surf and broad vistas of other ocean resorts. That problem is exacerbated by continuing development of surrounding areas. When Las Hadas was opened in 1974, it was virtually alone on its peninsula, looking across the water to the lights of Manzanillo. But the growth of the local tourist industry, which now includes several large, less distinguished chain resorts, has begun to crowd Las Hadas and its adjoining golf course and 70-slip marina. The creeping claustrophobia has been hastened by private condominium developments and by the popularity of Las Hadas itself, which became familiar to the world as the scene of Bo Derek's seduction in the movie "10." But inside the remarkable, if slightly surreal, atmosphere of Las Hadas, such concerns still seem remote.

At the opposite end of the tourist spectrum, and more than 700 miles down the coast, lies Mexico's newest major tourist resort, Huatulco, which is comprised of a series of bays and inlets in the southern state of Oaxaca. The development, which has three hotels so far -- three others are being built -- provides access to an area of coastal wilderness that is among the most remote and naturally beautiful in the country. In contrast to the over development of many Mexican vacation areas, Huatulco offers often magnificent vistas of unspoiled beaches and craggy islands glistening with spray from an often choppy sea. Boat tours provide efficient transportation and vantage points for viewing ocean and shore.